I don't know, but Chris L was always a C++ guy, he never really understood Objective-C in my opinion, which is why Swift ended up the way it did. I doubt he ever used it very much, or had a deep understanding of it.
I’m pretty sure Chris Lattner has a good grasp of Obj-C, after all they had to design Swift in a way it could easily interface with Obj-C. While Swift went through some versions to become stable, they were always transparent on the roadmap and had a very open attitude towards community proposals.
Looking back I think it was a very well executed transition and would consider it a success in every way.
> Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial
The Amiga is unsuitable for serious MIDI work because of a hardware design flaw. There are like 4 timers and the timer interrupts were at a higher priority than the serial port interrupt. There was only a 1-byte buffer for the serial port, so it was possible to lose data if one of the higher priority timers fired at the wrong time.[1]
I can't verify that since I sold everything ages ago, but before buying the A4000, first with my A500 and then the A2000 (w/ no acceleration) I could easily sample a complex flam+roll figure I did on my old Roland R8 pads at crazy granularity (software and hardware were capable of recording and playing 1/384 notes), and it didn't miss a single note.
That figure was obtainable by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad; very handy to simulate natural cymbal rolls during song pauses, endings etc. I used it during a song start with the snare, and the only editing necessary was performed afterwards to cut the inevitable leftover notes because I was playing with my fingers.
Software used was Dr T's KCS, which was a lot more optimized and snappy than MusicX, which I remember to be quite buggy too.
> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks
While I had an Amiga and thought it was ahead of its time, I think both the Commodore 64 and Atari ST have aged better than the Amiga. The Commodore 64 has the SID chip so it's basically a programmable synth and still used even today, the Atari ST has MIDI ports, so it's a programmable MIDI Controller with timing that is arguably better than anything modern. Of course, the Amiga was Jay Miner's design and the successor to the Atari 800, but was released by Commodore. But I fail to see what has survived from the Amiga, personally I prefer hardware sprites to the blitter/copper and the bitplane graphics. The playback of sound samples was nice at the time, but the SID chip is much more distinctive. HAM was interesting at the time, but not relevant at all today. The pre-emptive multitasking was interesting, but not that useful at the time. I prefer the single tasking of the Atari ST especially for music apps, because the timing is more precise.
There were tradeoffs. The C64's were eight pixels wider, and could also be pixel-doubled but the Amiga's were 3-colour without losing resolution and were not limited in height.
The biggest limitation was that both systems supported only eight of them.
The AGA chipset supported sprites up to 64 pixels wide, but I dunno if any game took advantage of this.
On the other hand, you had a lot of flexibility and options both with what you did with the available hardware sprites (e.g. some games drew backgrounds using sprite hardware!) and how you could manage without them (using blitter objects instead).
I'd rather have lots of hardware sprites like the Genesis, in addition to the blitter. I think a lot of Amiga games felt like they ran slow, because it's a lot easier to move a sprite, than to move a blitter object.
> I'll definitely want my country's Secretary of Health to be a doctor who understands public health and its related policies, not a politician whose primarily skill is being popular and getting elected.
Why not? The head of the WHO is not a medical doctor, he's a doctor in the sense that he has a PhD.
There is probably no organization more trusted than the WHO.
> why it's seen as acceptable to make broad generalizations based on race and sex in this way?
In the current climate, it is acceptable to make broad generalizations about white males, however if the same exact generalizations are made about black people, then they will call you racist (Black Lives Matter), or if you make the same exact generalizations about trans or non-binary people, you will also have problems. I don't think they are anti-Arab anymore, they lost interest in the War on Terror because it wasn't working. Instead, it looks like they are moving to demonize the Russians and the Chinese. Obviously, the climate will change at some point.
